A sparkline is a small line graph designed to be used in-line within text to illustrate a time series; the concept was developed by data presentation guru Edward Tufte. Here’s an example:

University of California 403(b) pension fund cumulative return Jan 1990-April 2004 (original data)

Equities		267%
Bonds		154%

The idea is to show, using minimal space, how a value varies over time. One advantage of sparklines’ compactness is that several can be used together to allow at-a-glance comparison between a set of time series. At Tufte’s web site there is a longer description of sparklines, with further examples, from a sample chapter of Tufte’s book, Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines are tangentially related to photography - they are used alongside images as a graphical design element in qualitative and quantitative analysis. (more…)

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I do almost all of my image processing using Adobe Photoshop CS3, in common with just about every other photographer on the planet. Much of this is automated using Photoshop Actions, which are a way to record and playback a sequence of Photoshop commands. In other programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel, these are called macros.

Actions are a way of automating Photoshop processes that are performed frequently, but they have one fundamental limitation: there is no way for an action to evaluate some condition and do something different based on the result. (more…)

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